Effective Communication Skills

I believe most of us have played the game "Broken Telephone" before. To refresh your memories, this is the game where the players line up and a message is passed from the first person to the second, then from the second person to the third person, and so on until the message reaches the very last person. That person will then read out the message that was passed to him/her and as we all know, the message has either very little or has completely no resemblance to the original. Somehow, as the message gets passed on from one individual to another, it gets "distorted" even though no one actually has any intention of doing so. So what went wrong? I believe most of us, if not all of us would attribute this problem primarily to communication breakdown.

Communication breakdown, undoubtedly, is the product of inffective communication between the parties involved. The whole purpose of communication, I believe, is simply to convey a message across to the parties of interest and if the message is not understood the way that it should be, then it has not served its intended purpose. Now this is where effective communication skills comes into play - these skills prevent any misunderstanding or misintepretation of the message that is being delivered.

In about a year's time, I'll be graduating from the Faculty of Engineering. There is definitely going to be a huge amount of competition from my peers during the job-seeking process. From my perspective, what would help me stand out from my peers, especially in the preparation of a resume as well as my manner of conduct during job interviews, is effective communication skills. I'm pretty sure we have all heard stories where people with lower academic qualifications were chosen over those with better academic qualifications for a particular job because somehow or other, such people were able to make themselves appear "more appealing" during job interviews. They effectively convince the interviewer that they were much more suited for the job position. They effectively convince the interviewer to "buy" what they were saying. They effectively behaved the right way and said the right things at the right place and at the right time. They effectively communicated their message across.

Apart from that, developing effective communication skills also enhances my listening skills - an ability that is so vital yet often neglected. Whenever the word "communication" is mentioned, most people tend to associate it merely speaking skills. For instance, they are concerned with how they could talk a client into buying their product or engaging their services. Or how they should be presenting their proposal at a business meeting. In all these situations, the majority of people would ask themselves, "What should I say?" or "How should I say it?" Due to the enormous amout of emphasis placed on oratory skills, people end up forgetting about listening. Listening, in my opinion, is one of the most crucial channel for us to receive input that could potentially make life a whole lot easier for us. Think about the situation when we are meeting with a potential client. Sometimes we get so caught up trying to persuade the potential client with our words that we do not listen to his/her words. By ignoring his/her words, we may actually be ignoring his/her needs, his/her feelings, and so forth. The final outcome? We could possibly lose some big business here. If only we had stopped to listen to our client, we could have understood him/her better and thus be able to "connect" with him/her. Such a "connection" strengthens business relationships which will in the long run prove to be beneficial. Clients or customers generally love it when their opinions are HEARD, payed attention to and valued. ( If you had realized, poor listening skills also contributed significantly to the communication breakdown mentioned in the "Broken Telephone" example above. )

Before I end this post, I would like to share a very interesting quotation from William Butler Yeats, a 20th century Irish poet and dramatist. It goes like this: "Think like a wise man but speak in the language of the people."